Your mage does not rely solely on destruction to deal damage.

As you will note above, I was responding to the statement "mages get owned at higher levels". My only direct damage dealing is Destruction, though. But if Destruction alone was enough to own everything, then Destruction would be overpowered and I would be the one in here complaining that other schools are useless and pure mage makes no sense.

Illusion and Conjuration are damage dealing schools in the same way that destruction is damage dealing, you could use either of those or both to the exclusion of destruction and be just fine. Destruction is enough to own everything if you don't level up things that you won't use I don' level other schools because I don't use them. I reject the notion of high level equaling lvl 40 or higher. I think if you character can run through the main quest and has skills they use destruction/alteration maxed then you are high level. Like I've stated above I have 200 hours in on a level 32 destruction/alteration mage.

1 v 1 destruction does not feel under powered to me. In fact I feel it is just the opposite, I can stun lock any opponent and kill them easily. Where I start to feel under powered is when there are multiple high level enemies. Stun lock becomes completely ineffective in that situation. It is impossible to use aoe spells such as chain lightning if you have a companion along. That brings you down to direct damage spells and a lot of running around. And I mean a lot of running around because you can't stand there spamming incenerates when the opposing mage or melee attacker can one shot you. It is extremely challenging to say the least especially in tight spaces.

I don't like companions in general, so Atronachs are enough for me. They let you use AoE if you match it to their element. Otherwise hopefully the extra punch from another companion would make up for it.

I am kind of biased because I don't see the attraction in sticking to one form of damage output and hoping the game will not be difficult. If that one form of damage is so high as to be enough on its own, it will be unbalanced in my opinion. My deathknight type character had trouble at low level until I broke down and used summons other than zombies. Now he can pretty much get by with 2H as his only source of damage output in most situations, but my perspective is that that is because smithing+enchanting is over powered, not that Destruction is underpowered. He would be more interesting to play if it was toned down. In fact I reverted him down to Dwarven everything, but he still rocks the Kasbah Actually to tell the truth I quite like him being OP in a way. I want to push his Conjuration up to 100 and get permanent zombies. Sometimes it is fun to play a badass.

I am. Read the post again.


You get more DPS at the cost of defense. So?


High-end daggers indeed do more DPS than swords, but the difference is minor. Legendary Ebony Blade, most damaging dagger in the game, does just 2.4 more DPS than Legendary Daedric Sword.


Stopped reading. Good job on missing the point completely.


DPS of two-handed weapons is not much higher than that of one-handed weapons, you're much better off with dual wielding if you want damage. That's because you can block and bash with two-handed weapons, so they strike a balance between shield and DPS.


Sure I can. Look at me now, I'm completely ignoring it.

Your argument reminds me of one of those TF2 trolling videos where a bunch of guys manage to go under the level itself and build turrets there, killing everything with impunity, saying "If Valve didn't want people to do this, why did they put it into the game?"

Screwups and mistakes do happen. Enchanting is a screwup. And the fact that you can find enchanted weapons/armor only adds to the problem.


Neither does your warrior. Smithing becomes almost mandatory at endgame, so that's another maxed skill out there. And how about Light/Heavy Armor and Block if you have it? That's 3-4 maxed skills you rely on as a warrior, so why should mages be forced to rely on only one?

its a game mechanic to reduce the cost to near zero for destruction especially, because you have to reduce spell cost or you won't be able to cast very many higher level spells enough to keep up with the tough enemies as you level up, its simple as that, the max destruction spell does like 200 damage and the max axe swing or bow damage shot etc is 800, so thats 4 times more damage than a destruction spell, and an archer can shoot one arrow after another and a melee fighter can swing his axe indefinately, it would be a joke if you had to wait every two spells for 30 seconds to fire two more spells, lol its like if you were an archer and could only fire two arrows then had to wait 30 seconds to fire two more, at level 50 with tough enemies all around you, or if you were a melee fighter and could only swing your sword twice then had to wait 30 seconds to swing it again. so seriously, the way they did it is how is has to be. if you want to gimp yourself and only cast 3 spells a minute fine, but i ain't playing like that.

exactly with this post...the op is not factoring in some things at all, a one handed or bow damage shot is like 4 or 5 times stronger than a magic spell, and magic regeneration is very slow and you can't cast very many strong magic spells until you have a lot of magic and start reducing your spell cost, plus mages rely on other schools of magic for defense etc so you need to be able to cast more than 5 spells a minute in battle, lol so if you want to nerf yourself fine, but don't be expecting bethesda to nerf the game for everyone else. it won't be happening since everyone knows that destruction magic isn't overpowered at all, its actually a bit underpowered at mid levels especially and lacks some punch, shot for shot, compared to other types of attacks, like with a bow or sword attack.

You can't ignore enchants for weapons but assume people are going to be chain casting dual cast incinerates without enchanted gear. You can boost any weapon's damage by 160% with the four enchants you're using to reduce destruction cost, on top of damage added to the weapon by an additional enchant.

The DPS doesn't really matter with the current state of balance though, anything used in combination with smithing, enchant, and/or alchemy is overpowered. Illusion and conjuration also are extremely overpowered -basically "I WIN" buttons late game - on their own. Enemy AI being extremely limited doesn't help either. It's nice that you've done some DPS math but it's meaningless out of context.

In practice destruction svcks unless you reduce it's cost to 0 or almost 0, which most players do not find a satisfying solution and/or consider it an exploit. Also needs to be noted that having to stack magicka is a major hit to survivability, melee doesn't have to stack stamina as high and archery doesn't need stam or magicka at all. So even if you stacked a ton of magicka instead of getting cost reduction enchants, you have to sacrifice a lot to achieve that. Even stacking purely magicka I think destruction spell cost would be limiting.

I admit that destruction is completely underpowered compared to EXPLOITED melee or archery BUT if you want to create 1 or 2 shot weapons to make yourself an uber character, you might as well just open the console and then type in the command "kill" on the target close it and BAM! the target is dead.

What I'm trying to say is that I don't min/max my character so I don't find destro underpowered. I normally keep my melee damage somewhere in the 100's so the game can actually be fun to me. To each his own I guess.

Everyone has their own opinion and they are welcome to it. I think when you want to state your case (which ever that might be) you need to try and be balanced and non-offensive.
I'm sorry to say OP, you have not been.

Please read the following http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1283497-destruction-versus-one-handed-statistics/page__hl__balance%20destruction this is how you make a balanced argument.

Dual cast Incinerate should produce more dps than Lightning Storm, especially if the casting times are taken into account. Also, Incinerate cannot be interrupted (practically speaking) like Lightning Storm can. That becomes important when fighting high level draugr with shouts that outrange LS.

Dualcast incinerate? That's 280% more magicka to cast over regular incinerate.

Interesting post, a good read.

The biggest problem for me is magicka cost, the expert level destro spells cost MORE than the expert level conjuration spells. This is ridiculous, you only need to cast that conjuration spell once. Another thing would be that 1h and 2h players have the ability to power attack. That triple dual 1h spin does x2 damage 3 times in a short period of time, you can also do this triple swing with 1 stamina, considering how fast you can do that spin with a dagger in your left hand, you can rack up some serious damage.

I came up with something to balance the combat skills and sort out some exploits/overpowered features available (e.g. 100% stagger and 100% reduction). http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1330096-fixing-the-combat-skills-in-skyrim/

This guy has a point.

You're kidding me, right? 72 DPS IF you're not dual weilding, IF you don't do crits and IF you don't do power attacks... and ofc IF you're not using enchantments. But if you're not using enchantments, the destro mage will run out of mana in a couple seconds, so then it will be 0 DPS... you may say enchantments are broken, but with no enchantments you can't play a destro mage in the first place, so you HAVE to include them in your calculations...

And when you do you'll find destro is way, WAY underpowered...

The page linked in the post I responded to used Lightning Storm in their damage calculations. I'm saying that it's not the most powerful option available to the Destruction school.

It's also possible to cast one of the Wall of ____ spells, then start dual casting Incinerate on top of the 50dps provided by the wall spell. Add another 200 damage over one second if the Disintigrate perk comes into play with Wall of Lightning and the enemy has < 15% health.

Mana efficiency, for one.

Assuming perks...

Incinerate Magicka cost: 171 x 0.5 = 85.5 x 2.8 = 239.4

Damage: 120 x 2.2 = 264 damage.

Wall of flames: 50 damage per second for 59 magicka per second.

Bye-bye magicka.

I am missing the point because your whole thread is about DPS - Damage Per Second

I tell you that you have to factor in your magicka regen, which you say you did, yet you didn't put it into your numbers? Like I said, we are only factoring the first 10 seconds of combat right? Not the actual DPS.

Again, your whole thread is about DPS - Damage Per Second - I say what about dual wielding weapons, you ARE dual wielding spells you know? You say "You get more DPS at the cost of defense. So?" Uh yeah what was I thinking giving melee more DPS in a DPS thread.

Then I give you a perk that makes dual wielding 35 percent faster and you stopped reading because I missed the point somehow?

Somehow you want everyone to ignore all the ways melee and archery can get damage boosts and just agree with you.


Edit: How many people do you see making topics about starting to 1 hit things on master level with magic? How many for melee and archery? Funny huh.

Did you miss this from the article?


Or... Am I missing the point?

It's hard not to be "offensive" when faced with posts like yours. Read the entire thread(and, preferably, understand it) before you post.

Oh, is that too much to expect? Too offensive for you? Fine then, I'll give you a direct link to what you need to read:
http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1331034-destruction-balance/page__view__findpost__p__20019825


First post. The "High level Destruction spells are far too costly to be used constantly." section. I'm sorry I cannot give you a direct link but it's near the bottom.


What, you seriously think dual-wielding will make 42DPS into 180DPS? From dual wielding you can get at most 1.33(spamming double attacks) * 1.35(Dual Flurry) = 1.79 multiplier. 42 * 1.79 = 75. Still nowhere near enough.


No, I stop reading because you mentioned Enchanting(see, that's why I ended the quote at "...enchant"), and one of the main points of my OP was that balance in Skyrim is fine AS LONG AS YOU DON'T INCLUDE ENCHANTING.

^---Whatever helps you seem right man. The combat skills are balanced as long as you don't use enchanting (also counts finding enchanted weapons I guess), smithing and alchemy. The combat skills are balanced when you only count the first 10 seconds of combat. Combat balance is perfectly fine so I wouldn't worry about your dual wield assassin getting nerfed.

Magic dps is 0 when you go out of magicka, which happens very fast unless you stack alot of -destro cost gear, which emphasis the problem of strictly requiring enchanting and 1 enchant.

And apart from this, spamming the same spell for 90% of your play time is ...pretty bad. Low magicka regen and 100% stagger for DC is also stupid. Thank god for mods though.

One thing that I don't see factored in here is the effect or armor/resistance on dps. I don't know the resistance of enemies (I assume it is normally zero based on the gear they have when I loot them), however most enemies do have armor. As a result, I would expect melee attacks to have a much more practical dps than what is described. I would imagine that for mages, the issue isn't dps, but the fact that they can't take hits like a player in armor. They expect the enemies to drop faster, but they don't.

Enemy armor is practically nothing.

I've always noted that destruction is very strong. It's too powerful early on. However, swords do not swing once every second. More like 1,3 times in a second, so DPS gets bigger.

Destruction should benefit from leveling up the skill in other ways that make them slightly cheaper. Make the base value half of what it is not and add a formula that adds damage as your skill increases. If a level 1 guy without perks would be able to find a master level spell, he could use it at full power and infinitely. (-100% magicka cost for spells gear..) Thus, it's power should scale with your destruction spell. Just as conjuration durability should slightly depend on your conjuration skill.

But, melee and archery both benefit from smithing, enchanting and alchemy, while destruction only benefits from "alchemy".
If you ignore a part the size of enchanting and alchemy, it's like comparing the iron daggers damage to destruction power..